We are in a golden age of innovation in the web development space. This issue demonstrates using some of the most current and useful tools for building web applications. Check out our articles on HTML5, Web Sockets and node.js!
When people think of having to store data for their applications, a database such as SQL Server immediately comes to mind. However, XML files are very handy for storing data without the overhead of a database. Using XML files to cache often-used, but seldom changed data such as US state codes, employee types and other validation tables can avoid network roundtrips and speed up your application. In addition, XML files are great for off-line applications where a user needs to add, edit and delete data when they can’t connect to a database.
We seem to be an industry enamored with buzz words. Even though XmlHttpRequest has been around since the mid-90s, mainstream programmers didn’t give it a second thought until someone attached the term AJAX to it. The same is true for the never-ending quest to put as many different words as we can in front of “driven-development.” Another term that hit the scene in recent years is dependency injection.
Node.js by itself is a blank canvas. However, the Express.js web framework for Node.js provides programmers with a clear, concise development platform to build high performance Web APIs.
In the world of browser-based development, interoperability is king. Unfortunately, interoperability can be at the expense of performance.
A Single Page Application (SPA) is a different way of building HTML 5 applications from traditional Web page development. Instead of spreading the functionality of your Web applications across a collection of separate Web pages with hyperlinks between them, you instead define a single root page that the user lands on and never leaves as long as they are working with your application. You define client-side logic that switches out the data and chunks of content within that page to allow the user to navigate from logical screen to logical screen without ever leaving the page. This means that the user never sees a full page refresh while using your application. They see portions of the screen change based on their interaction, and those changes can be done in a more fluid way with transitions to enhance the user experience. You can also support using the application while offline by storing data client-side, based on some of the newer APIs of HTML 5. Taking this approach makes an SPA feel very much like a desktop application to the end user.
The ASP.NET team has created lots of new goodies. One of the most useful, SignalR, is an async library for .NET to help build real-time, multi-user interactive web applications. Imagine this scenario: you have a web application and would like a simple way to push notifications to any number of clients. Perhaps you want to inform the client when something happens. You could write a polling mechanism, but that is inefficient. An event-based approach is a much more efficient approach. Event-based systems that can publish and subscribe to events are typically loosely coupled systems that easily adapt to change and are highly scalable. The SignalR library makes it very easy to build loosely coupled scalable applications that can send real-time updates to specified clients. In this article, I will take you through the some basic steps to get up and running with SignalR.
The CODE Framework provides a set of tools for developing n-tier, service-oriented applications. In addition, there is a set of recommended patterns and practices that provide guidance in enabling developers to achieve Rapid Application Development, Contract-First implementation, and a system that allows you to change a contract without breaking an implementation. However, one question which has been repeatedly asked throughout our trainings and seminars is, “How do I Unit Test when I’m using the CODE Framework?” This article will examine the question and attempt to answer it.